What’s next?

January 11, 2014 — maxwest

I have a few announcements to make and it regards my next projects.

Currently, I’m busy with the production of Sunnyville Stories episode 9 and the preparations for a Kickstarter to fund a bigger printing of Sunnyville books. There’s more details about that on my primary blog.

Anyway, once I finish up the next Sunnyville work, I’m going to go ahead with the planned sequel to Von Herling titled Von Herling Faces Death. As this is intended to be no more than 40-60 pages, its production shouldn’t take too long and it should meet its planned release date of May.

However, once I finish the Von Herling sequel, I probably won’t be doing any more Von Herling works for a long time. Why? First off, Gothic horror (and horror in general) is not my usual forte. The Von Herling property represents genre adultery for me. As you all know, comedy and slice-of-life are my areas of expertise.

Doing an entire graphic novel from scratch was also much work. At least with Sunnyville, I’m collecting existing material and putting into book form. That gives me something to work with. To put together a whole original book took almost a year’s worth of writing, planning, drawing, and editorial processing to complete. The time and resources invested? Those could have been used towards Sunnyville Stories. Keep in mind that I am planning to put out a third volume of the series by 2016. While that seems like a lot of time, I still have to assemble the necessary content (at the time of this writing, about roughly half of the book is ready to go) and I also have to take care of the book’s promotional campaign, solicitations to vendors, and other matters like ISBN and LCCN. On top of that, I plan to release a grand total of ten volumes of Sunnyville – volume 4 will be out in 2017 and volume 5 in 2018.

I cannot fight a war on two fronts. I can’t simply work on the other Von Herling stories while also working on Sunnyville. It’s a shame too. I have notes for at least two more adventures with the intrepid August Von Herling.

Within the next week, I’ll be releasing another book. It will be a compilation for the Amazon Kindle titled The Whimsical Worlds of Max West. This will collect some of my other comics work, including one of my early zines and unpublished art. I’ll have an announcement about it soon enough.